Once each year, the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts asks a Leipzig-based, female artist to propose an exhibition featuring the works of another female artist with ties to the city. Rosa Loy was selected in 2018; she suggested that the MdbK choose Angelika Tübke.

Angelika Tübke (*1935 in Dessau) went to school Wolfen. She enrolled at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) in 1954 with the aim of becoming a book illustrator. Painting was still taboo in the 1950s, and she only produced drawings and lithographs until her graduation in 1959. First they were still lifes, then whole figures, later nudes, thematic landscapes and works depicting nature, in this order. At the time, Werner Tübke was an assistant for figure drawing. They met and married in 1960, one year after Angelika Hennig had graduated from the HGB. The same year, Angelika and Werner Tübke set off on an eleven-year journey to the Soviet Union, the Caucasus and the republics of central Asia. She became a member of the Association of Fine Artists in the GDR in 1963. She was not permitted to work as an artist after her maternal leave (for her children Adrian and Albrecht) and so divorced Werner Tübke in 1976. She left Leipzig in 1982 and settled in Dalliendorf, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, marrying Hans Gräfe in 1988.

Dalliendorf is a small village of just slightly over 100 inhabitants. It was there that Angelika Tübke found the peace she requires for her richly detailed artworks, produced in the style of the Old Masters. She finds her inspiration in nature and the people living in her immediate environment.

Her landscapes point to role models like Corot, Turner and Constable, as well as the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, themselves natives of Mecklenburg. Her portraits draw most heavily on the van Eyck Brothers and Memling, as well as Dürer, Cranach and Holbein.

The exhibition in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts is showing around 60 drawings, watercolours and paintings. The earliest pieces originate in Tübke’s time at the HGB Leipzig, while the most recent works are only a few years old.

The Museum owns Angelika Tübke’s largest painting from 1963 depicting an Uzbek farming couple, as well as individual drawings from 1966.